Got batteries? Outage stalls giant tech show in Las Vegas

January 10, 2018

Mariana Marcaletti laughs as she tries on a Spartan boxer, an underwear that blocks radiation from wireless devices, during CES Unveiled at CES International Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

What happens to all those internet-connected refrigerators, robots and other devices when the power goes out?

Thousands of people attending the world's biggest consumer technology show got a chance to test the battery life of the latest gadgets Wednesday when some showrooms and hallways went dark inside the vast Las Vegas Convention Center.

The power has been out for at least an hour in some areas of the annual CES event. Conference organizers said on Twitter that it was an "isolated power outage" they were working to resolve.

Dozens of reporters queued quietly for lunch boxes in a darkened press room. The room was dimly lit thanks to emergency overhead lights and the glow of laptops running on battery power.

Rick Rohmer, a product engineer with electrical-systems specialist Legrand, said the power outage affected only part of a booth for Qi, a consortium of companies that make wireless chargers. Most of its display was lit as hundreds of attendees passed by in the dark on their way to a brightly lit giant screen TV over the convention center's fully functioning South Hall.

"We lucked out," he said. "If our extension cord went over there we'd be out of power."

NV Energy, the region's power supplier, hasn't responded to requests for comments.

Related Stories

Tesla Motors' grid storage battery in South Australia, switched on at just the beginning of December, has already shown it is up to the job of serving as a backup system in South Australia. Its quick response is the stuff ...

If you think you can use the solar panels on your roof to power your home during an outage, think again. During an outage, while your home remains connected to the grid, the devices that manage your solar panels are powered ...

Ruyan Guo, Robert E. Clark Endowed Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), has received a $50,000 I-Corps grant from the National Science Foundation to commercialize ...

Constituting over 78 % of the air we breathe, nitrogen is the element found the most often in its pure form on earth. The reason for the abundance of elemental nitrogen is the incredible stability and inertness of dinitrogen ...

Off the coast of Washington, columns of bubbles rise from the seafloor, as if evidence of a sleeping dragon lying below. But these bubbles are methane that is squeezed out of sediment and rises up through the water. The locations ...

The dramatic difference in gonad size between honey bee queens and their female workers in response to their distinct diets requires the switching on of a specific genetic program, according to a new study publishing March ...

An international team based in Ghent, Belgium (VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology) and Basel, Switzerland (University of Basel), found a link between a class of enzymes and immune signals that is rapidly triggered ...

New photonic tools for medical imaging can be used to understand the nonlinear behavior of laser light in human blood for theranostic applications. When light enters biological fluids it is quickly scattered, however, some ...

One of the ocean's little known carnivores has been allocated a new place in the evolutionary tree of life after scientists discovered its unmistakable resemblance with other sea-floor dwelling creatures.

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.